Dr. Ieva Jusionyte spoke with Recall This Book hosts Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz about her recent celebrated book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border, which follows guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, charting the movements and the legal, social, and personal repercussions. Ieva has a doctoral degree in anthropology from Brandeis and is a professor at Brown University, and a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow. She has worked as a journalist, volunteer firefighter, and emergency medical technician. Exit Wounds is her third book. A longer version of this conversation was broadcast on the podcast Recall This Book, a Public Books partner. You can listen here or subscribe to Recall This Book on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Elizabeth Ferry (EF): Ieva, would you start off by telling us a little bit about Exit Wounds, and how you came to this topic?

Ieva Jusionyte (IJ): Exit Wounds looks at the issue of gun trafficking from the United States to Mexico from a variety of viewpoints: it is a multi-sited ethnography. It’s about the different meaning of guns in the United States and in Mexico and how the vicious circle of violence connects migration, drug addiction, and drug smuggling.

I came to it by serendipity. I was on the US-Mexico border in Southern Arizona doing fieldwork for my previous book with emergency responders. I was volunteering as a paramedic and firefighter in Mexico and Arizona and passing through the border sometimes twice a day.

I didn’t immediately pay attention to the signs that say, “Bringing guns and ammunition to Mexico is a crime. You can go to prison.” You don’t think about it. You are much more concerned about what you can’t bring into the United States. It took me a while to begin asking questions. I didn’t know that gun laws in Mexico were so different. I didn’t know that most guns recovered in crime scenes in Mexico—over 70% and probably more—come from the United States.

I was already there, and I was already an ethnographer. I was interested in borders as sites of state violence. I became very curious and I thought I would like to follow the guns south.

EF: There are six or so characters you go into quite deeply, including a journalist, including someone who’s very interested in purchasing guns to protect his family in Monterrey, a whole range of different people. You interleave that with the history and legal matters really clearly.

John Plotz (JP): I really love your note on methods and your hesitancy to quantify, to turn people into numbers. You began, though, by talking about the number of murders committed annually in Mexico as compared to the United States. In 2019 there were 35,000 murders in Mexico. In the United States there were only 16,000. The ratio of murders is something like twenty-eight people murdered per 100,000 in Mexico as opposed to only five in the United States.

Those are really compelling numbers, especially when you consider how many of those murders are committed by the guns trafficked from the US that you are cataloging. Could I ask you to start out with numbers, despite, as Elizabeth said, your commitment to the braided stories and the deep history?

EF: I’d add another pair of numbers that you present at the beginning along with these, which is the number of gun stores in US states bordering Mexico: 9,940. And the number of gun stores in Mexico: two. And the second one was only added recently.

IJ: It seems easier to talk about gun violence through numbers. You can get them through public information records requests. They seem very tangible. The numbers were something I could get when it was difficult to find people who wanted to talk to me. One route of doing this research was really becoming obsessed with the numbers.

Even though as an anthropologist, and an anthropologist who studies illicit economies, I know that most of these numbers are very inaccurate representations for what we are talking about. Yes, murders may be more accurate in the United States, but that number is so low because in the US, gun suicides outnumber gun homicides. If we added that, the number of gun deaths would be similar, but it’s another question.

The number of gun stores, yes, the difference between almost 10,000 and 1 now 2 is stark. The 10,000 stores are brick-and-mortar federally licensed gun dealerships and there are a lot of gun sales that also happen privately, in the back of a truck, in front of Walmart.

JP: Or ghost guns.

IJ: Or ghost guns, yes. Because numbers play such a huge role in policy and in media representations as well, I wanted them to be there and think with them but always take them with a grain of salt.

EF: It’s a very particular genre: numbers as story. One of the stories you focus on is about a journalist. Your first book, Savage Frontier, is located in an area of three borders in Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. Savage Frontier looked at journalists and the ways in which journalists stepped in and did some of the work of the state. Some of the work of how borders were managed both legally and illegally. Your second book, Threshold, does something in some ways similar but around emergency responders. Then here we have this very interesting figure of the journalist in Exit Wounds who is like you but different from you also. How does this play in your work more generally?

IJ: As an anthropologist, journalists are like our doppelgangers, at least for me.

I’m very interested in how we decide where the boundary between legal and illegal is: What is crime? And what is justified state forms of violence because it’s part of the state’s monopoly on force? Journalists in my first book were the ones that made certain border violence and crime legible: drug trafficking primarily. In the second book I was interested in and focused on emergency responders. In this book, I was interested in an object, the gun. The journalists who are trying to tell these stories also play with the same numbers and they follow the same objects and try to tell the same story.

EF: At the same time, you must have been very aware of the degree of danger that exists for journalists working on these topics in Mexico and how that related to what you could or couldn’t do.

IJ: It was a way of sharing the danger. Juan specifically, a character in my book, is in a government protection program. I’ve done other things with him since this book. I sometimes co-sign articles as the way to deflect danger from him because I am much safer in the United States as a US citizen. At the same time, he also deflects danger from me when I go to those communities where I don’t know how to recognize the risks.

JP: I love your Charles Tilly quote about “the state as protection racket.” If I understand you, your point is to see the state in its multivalent role in a situation where it doesn’t have a monopoly on violence. How do you understand state actors in that?

IJ: People who work for organized crime groups in Mexico, people who work for the military or the police who are part of the state, they all use guns. They all perform certain security functions.

JP: “Non-monopolistic violence.”

IJ: If we strip off this designation that this violence is legitimate because it belongs to the state and this one is not, what can we really understand? Because as Tilly said, what states do effectually is basically a protection racket with the advantage of legitimacy.

JP: Can we talk about the “plaza,” a zone that’s jurisdictionally under the sway of an organized group. Is that a case where you can see the quirks of the multiple kinds of violence workers who are in this space?

IJ: “Plaza” is very descriptive. It’s a town square. These organized crime groups fight over plaza as the territory that needs to be controlled. Usually in these plazas, violence happens when there is competition, whether it is from different groups or whether a particular group and the state. It’s the territorial expression of what we are talking about in terms of violence.

EF: You were talking about your interest in legality and illegality through all these works that you’ve done. The border is where these things become made manifest in particular kinds of ways. In a sense that’s what the plaza is, almost like a fractal thing, where the same thing happens at the illegal scale that happens at the legal scale with borders.

IJ: I love the fractal analogy. Exactly.

JP: To press that point about violence as a product: Are you saying that violence is a product of the moments when who controls it is illegible or debatable or contestable?

IJ: This is why we need to talk about what we mean by violence. Yes, when there is clear control by one group, including the state, there might not be brutal attacks and shootouts and killings. However, as anthropologists we know that there is structural violence. We’re thinking about different laws, what is made a crime and what is not? Who can have a gun and who can’t? What kind of gun, but also who makes the guns, and what kind of guns? Who makes the ammunition, how does that ammunition get into the car and across the border? These are the various layers of the production of violence.

Then we also have symbolic production of violence, which I don’t talk much about in the book, but we have the narconovelas, the narcocorridos (i.e., drug stories and drug ballads) and this whole symbolic world around the mafia.

EF: In the United States, guns are a constitutional protection, and people have lots of sentimental or personal or cultural things that they project onto guns. I’m curious if you want to say anything more about that. That was such an important part of the difficulty of unraveling this problem, right?

IJ: The United States is unique in our attachment to guns and gun culture, even compared to other countries where guns are very prominent, whether it’s Israel or Switzerland. A lot of it has to do with how guns have gone from practical tools to become part of a narrative of the frontier and freedom and a masculine style of power—

EF: Also, a sign of personal autonomy that’s under threat.

IJ: Yes, but that was all used by gun companies in their advertising. Mexico for example, doesn’t allow gun advertising. Even in Safari Club International’s magazines you can find ads for vests or boots, but you will not see images of firearms. The fact it’s such a big business in the United States and there is a lobby behind it, which makes us take it for granted.

There is now another gun culture in the United States emerging out of how many people have been traumatized by gun violence. That’s also not where most gun violence in the United States occurs. Most gun violence happens in inner-city neighborhoods. It involves handguns and it’s not the kind of violence we rally around. When we talk about US gun culture, having a cross-cultural analysis and comparison really helps us see how bizarre our attachment to guns is.

EF: Your book disrupts the idea that “it’s in Mexico that there’s no legality. People are crazy down there and they’re shooting each other.” The rhetoric of our President and others of us around the southern border creates this notion that there’s this bastion of security and legality in the United States and it’s under a threat from the South. But the southern border is also a northern border and there’s also a threat of guns and gun violence going south—equally illegal from the perspective of Mexico and equally damaging.

IJ: In our public narratives we describe Mexico as a violent country and refugees and migrants who come here as bringing that violence. But we don’t somehow connect the dots that it is our guns that make that violence that people are fleeing.

Historically, from Mexico, yes, the northern border is a threat because it was the United States that chopped off a huge chunk of its territory and invaded Mexico several times. Now it’s sending the guns. And this is where the demand for drugs is.

When we talk about US gun culture, having a cross-cultural analysis and comparison really helps us see how bizarre our attachment to guns is.

JP: You end the book by visiting a Smith & Wesson factory in Springfield. We all live in Massachusetts, and we think of it as a gun-unfriendly state, comparatively speaking. But you bring home some of the same things as people who did analysis of the production of slave clothing or shackles before the Civil War, which were all manufactured in New England. So New England may have been putatively antislavery, but nonetheless shipping down the implements of its—

EF: And profiting from.

JP: It was good old capitalism in action. So, I was wondering about your decision to end with the Smith & Wesson factory.

IJ: I was already writing the book and I thought, I don’t know how to end it. Let me go somewhere where it all began. Also, when I was in the field in Mexico, I was taught to shoot that Smith & Wesson M&P 15, which is an AR-15 style rifle. I did not connect that these are made in Massachusetts. I knew the history of Connecticut and Colt and Smith & Wesson here, but it felt so detached from what was happening in Mexico. At the same time, my whole book is about the connection and not the detachment.

You can’t really visit the factory anymore because of protests (i.e., by gun safety advocates and families of victims of gun violence). They’re moving a lot of production of rifles because Massachusetts is not very friendly to production of semiautomatic rifles.

JP: You refer to literature and kind of weave in and out of writerly encounters in ways that I love. You quoted Alice Munro at a moment when I wasn’t necessarily thinking of it: “In my previous work, despite occasional disagreements on matters both political and personal, we shared core values and deep commitments to serving the community [but in this book] such camaraderie wasn’t possible when I began hanging out with people who engaged in violence but nor could I close myself off. Writer Alice Munro called it ‘the pain of human contact’: ethnography is often painful this way.”

Can you talk more about that feeling of pain, for the non-anthropologists?

IJ: There are so many definitions of ethnography. I really like calling ethnography “deep hanging out” or what in textbooks you would call participant observation. It is spending a lot of time with people and, yes, we do interviews, but most interesting things happen between those interviews. What does that mean when you follow people for a very long time? Well, you establish relationships with people, you become friends or you become enemies. I think what the Alice Munro quote helped me say is that ethnography can be an extremely gratifying and enriching experience. But it also bruises you very heavily, that connection to other people.

In my previous work where I was part of this firefighter and paramedic community, we disagreed on some political things, but we eventually shared core values. Whereas with the gun users and gun smugglers and members of organized crime, these are people whose job is to kidnap others for ransom, but for them it was me whose job it could be to share this information with law enforcement or with the journalists. They could never entirely trust me. I could never trust them. We still had to live together for a long time.

JP: You used the word bruising.

IJ: It leaves an imprint on your body, not just the human connections that you form in ethnography, but the fieldwork itself.

EF: Anybody who writes about these topics has to confront how to write about violence in a way that isn’t sensationalizing or that doesn’t flatten the people that are there or doesn’t accept certain kinds of categories of how the conflict should be thought about.

IJ: I had to ask myself a question: Would writing this book do more harm than good, because it risks reproducing certain tropes? And yet, here in the United States we don’t acknowledge the guns that are going south to Mexico. Balance is the most difficult question, right?

I was reading all of these writers who were thinking and writing about violence. Yuri Herrera was very important to me because he very thoughtfully says that he will not use certain words when he writes about migration on the border. It’s more difficult for a nonfiction writer as an anthropologist to completely avoid terms like cartel or narco or sicario. I try to do that, but it’s more than just not sensationalizing in content and in a selection of words. I wanted to create a mood. I wanted to unsettle people but not overdo it. It’s only the readers who can tell me whether it worked or not.

JP: Early on you said, “Finding a sincere voice of my own has not been easy. As an ethnographer working in proximity to violence, I’ve learned to use language as personal protective equipment. I liken it to the gloves and masks, we donned as paramedics caring for the sick and injured. A shield insulating me from the brutal reality I witnessed. I hesitated to take it off.”

I have just a simple question. Are you talking about the language you use to write this book or are you talking about how you used language when you were in the field? Or do you mean both?

IJ: It has multiple layers, right? Because violence is notoriously difficult to communicate if we’re talking about torture. It just shatters language.

Then with the PPE, I needed some kind of distance from that reality that I’m describing. I needed the distance geographically, too. I needed to come back to the United States to write. It was very difficult to write anything in Mexico. I needed a different language. Most of the research was done in Spanish in Mexico. Translating it into English was already creating another distance and another layer between me and those experiences, not only what I saw, what I heard, what other people told me, but from that whole reality. Language was that layer between me and the experiences and the stories.

JP: You said there was a set of things that your students really liked learning: “patience, persistence and humility.” Is learning those principles relevant to the question of how far away you can actually manage to go?

IJ: Absolutely. Going back to memories of graduate school, I don’t think I learned methods very well. I don’t think you can learn methods in the classroom. You learn through experience. I have been recently teaching a lot of ethnographic research methods and I thought, how can I convey the experience that it actually is and what it takes?

It takes a lot of patience. There are a lot of people who say no, a lot of people who don’t respond and you have to stick around and kind of prove that you really care.

Persistence: very much the same, go and knock on the door again and again and again.

Humility: nobody owes you the story or the answer. You have to show to other people that you’re really interested in hearing it and if they want, they can share it. If they don’t, yes, you take the refusals. I had a lot of people who, for obvious reasons, were afraid to talk to me because there was no trust in either the government or the other side of the law.

It’s always hard to balance where your persistence ends and you begin accepting refusal.

JP: You also make a point about people in situations where their lives can’t be fully narratable to them. You quote Hannah Arendt in terms of the sheer happening of a situation of enormity. One can experience and report on things that happen but not put them into order.

However, as the writer on the edge of that enormity happening, you strove to order those events and experiences in your book. Although in a certain sense there’s something about the structure of your book that keeps it a bit open as well, isn’t there?

IJ: I don’t think it has a clear beginning or a clear end. You are stuck in these vicious circles of violence between US and Mexico.

EF: Especially at the ending—you have two endings. You have a more optimistic ending that doesn’t seem to be quite enough for you. The final ending is more sincere. It’s not pessimistic—or that’s not its dominant sort of mood—but it’s more open.

IJ: One of the things people always ask is what can I do? I thought I owe it to them to at least think through some of those answers. I don’t know whether we can achieve it, but we can work toward that goal. Meanwhile look what’s happening here with Smith & Wesson producing rifles faster than I can write this book.

JP: What’s the takeaway for you in terms of what you want your next project to look like?

IJ: Yes, I’m deep in the throes of my next project. It’s very much a continuation—just as this book emerged from my last one. I am doing a project on extraditions and on whether justice can be exported from Mexico to the United States. It’s still very much about the two of these countries together, and the big mess of law and justice and violence. 

This article was commissioned by John Plotz.